What is the great lure behind OSX ?

[Dicehunter]

I made a hackintosh a few days ago and I can honestly not see what everyone is raving about.
It's heavily locked down compared to Windows, Gaming performance is'nt that good and it looks bland and boring.
Why do so many people flock to it ?

 

[Feronix]

Well, imo, it does look pretty sleek but that's all about personal taste.

I guess what so many people like about it is that it just works. Not that another OS doesn't work, but that that OS X is very plain and simple so that anyone could understand it. There aren't a lot of ways to do certain things. What you can't change; you can't break.

Both Windows and Mac will do what you need it to do, it's just that with Mac there's only one way from point A to B, you can't get lost. With Windows/Linux there are multiple ways, and you can chose which one you like best.

 

[SuB]

Simlicity is just about it tbh. The Terminal stuff is pretty good, and in my opinion the php development environment is better and easier to setup.

 

[equk]

I think it's ok

Depends on what you use your computer for.
I tried it for a few months a while ago and for development/design stuff it's not too bad, the interface is nice & it's pretty quick compared to windows.

For people switching from linux/windows there are a lot of quirks and problems.
eg:
mouse movement is completely messed up
(sensitivity in system preferences actually controls acceleration, the only way around this was to set my deathadder to 3500dpi & set sensitivity to 0)

For a work setup I think osx is nicer/better than windows (providing you don't mind the quirks)

Personally I find linux to be a lot better than Windows & OSX for a work environment.

 

[Vicey]

Expose, Spotlight Search, The Dock, Toast Popups, The fact you can interact with another window that isn't your currently active window (Close it, Minimize, Scroll in it etc).

The quality of the 3rd party Apps. Movist for video is way better than VLC in interface and responsiveness as one example. I also really like Apples Mail program. iMessage is excellent on OS X. There are lots of really well made OS X applications like these from 3rd parties. Transmit, TextWrangler, 1Password, TweetDeck, Adium.

To give OS X a fair shake you really need to use it for a month and put all your normal work in to it. Setup the email, setup your skype or IM, use the FTP programs and the text editors, try iPhoto or Aperture etc

Personally I prefer it to Windows but I don't game on OS X. To me it's a place to get work done very efficiently and I also use it as my life machine with regards to browsing and email and IMing. The only thing I use Windows for is Gaming and Programming at this point.

 

[alienware]

It's easy to use, easy to navigate and designed to run on "Always the same" hardware so it's optmised very well and based on a very solid platform (Unix).

A reinstall (should you ever need one which is doubtful) is pish easy and there are no drivers to contend with.

All of which are very alluring if you CBA learning how an operating system works.

 

[Vicey]

One thing I forgot to mention was Time Machine which is an amazing thing to use, very very simple to setup and to retrieve files. It really just works like Magic and even now with Windows 8 it barely reaches the competency of Time Machine but still lacks the easy to use interface. Time Machine came out 6 years ago with Mac OS X Leopard.

I really feel every OS should have a dependable and easy to use backup solution with file versioning support.